


Someone Else's Music

by Bakcheia



Category: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Genre: Ghosts, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Recreational Drug Use, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 03:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17035949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/pseuds/Bakcheia
Summary: All ghosts and no Christmas.





	Someone Else's Music

**Author's Note:**

  * For [problematiquefave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/problematiquefave/gifts).



> Happy yuletide!

Lord Henry doesn't believe in such a thing as the human soul, except when it's convenient, which is to say, when it will win his point. Then again, he is only an atheist to be shocking and in the small hours in his private chambers there is no one to be shocked. No one except for the ghost that sits and sobs on the end of his bed, clutching the counterpane with painted fingers.

The crisply golden hair glitters in the abandoned light of a long set sun, the cheeks are softly flushed with blood that should be beating through a body half a city away. Henry cannot be afraid of it, it is the loveliest thing in the room. He watches it with the pleasure that comes from seeing something truly beautiful, the tugging, hurting pleasure that feels so akin to grief. There is not the worry that a more sober man might suffer, that he is going mad. Lord Henry takes opium in many forms; tinctures in wine, small round pharmaceutical pellets, drops from thick bottles placed directly on the tongue and pink-tipped cigarettes. The pallid spectres and fever dreams which had haunted De Quincey and inspired Coleridge's Kubla Khan had been utterly absent from his entranced nights, and indeed he had almost begun to consider the lack of them as a slur on his imagination.

The portrait turns to look at him and although its presence steeps the atmosphere in misery its face wears the look of ecstatic awakening with which it had been painted. Basil had given its eyes the wavering iridescent sheen of cymophanes and they fix on Henry now with the same lustrous wonder of that summer morning in the garden.

 _'What have you done?_ ' it says,  _'What have you done?'_

He blinks and finds himself awakening into a warm golden morning, a bird outside sings the same notes over and over in a relentless monotony and the tawdry sun has driven every speck and shadow of mystery from the place. He considers sending a telegram to Basil;  _Took 300 grains of opium_ ** _stop_** _Your ideal is not happy with me_ ** _stop_** _Suggestions welcome_ ** _stop_**

 

*      *      *

 

The garden has changed since Dorian was last in it but he himself has not. The flame of the laburnums have dimmed to sullen embers, giving their spotlight to heavy clusters of Peruvian lilies, whose leopard-spotted petals flare like pink warning lamps in the gathering evening dark.

They sit together under the rustling brown pea pods, Basil and Dorian, the first time they have been alone together for several months. Dorian is as beautiful as ever. The last of the sunlight drips through the leaves and lands in gleaming splashes all about him, touching him with gold. Basil longs to paint him as an addict yearns for the tainted smoke of his pipe, every movement and fluctuation in light brings some new revelation and pricks sluggish blood from an unhealed, wretched longing. Twenty-two years old now and still caught in the web of his own youth like a silver fish in a net, the changelessness of his beauty has not bought the comfort of familiarity and Basil feels, as sharply as he did all those years ago, a piercing terror, as if a thorn is pressing upon his heart.

Conversation is stilted. Basil had at first been delighted with Lord Henry's more than usual lateness but now he misses his languid humour and the effortless way he has of spinning philosophies out of nothing. Art is an awkward subject between them these days and he has not the sort of mind that can make nonsense a pleasant fascination. In desperation he tries compliments and those at least come easily enough, how could they not, especially when Dorian turns that wonderful face up to his with the blush rising in it like a memory of roses.

His white, slender fingers that had been trailing lazily in the grass come up to rub languidly down the long lovely line of his own inner thigh. Basil's voice clots suddenly in his throat and when Dorian rises from his chair and crosses to him his own hands raise defensively, as if in protest at some expected fatal blow. He might as well have tried to push back the rising tide or rip out the sweet hot pulsing that has started up low in his belly. Dorian slips between his upraised hands with a laugh and sits sideways on his lap with the easy confidence of one who has never been unwanted. The tips of his fingers find their way between the buttons of his shirt, his rose petal lips are brushing against the black beginnings of stubble on his throat.

Basil's ribs creak in his chest as if they are wound close about with vines. For a moment the white marble purity of Dorian's face transports him to one of his painted landscapes, whose green glades and foreign shores are wrapped and caressed by the dark waters of forgotten, wine-coloured seas. But then the moment ends and they tangle together under the modern sun of a freshly-minted god and his desires are coarse and dreadful things.

He wants to pull him back into his arms and kiss his hair, his cheeks, every inch of the body that trembles beneath his hands like the golden strings of a harp. He will bite the soft ripe skin of his lips until the blood rises in them, he will swallow every moan and cry he makes and hoard them within himself as a miser hoards gold, he will suck every panting breath into his own lungs.

He pushes Dorian away instead.

“You mustn’t let me do this to you.” He is pinned between Dorian and the wicker garden chair as a butterfly is pinned to a collector's board. “You mustn’t let anyone do this to you, this isn't what love is.”

“Oh, you and your ethics, Basil.”

It is not said with a sneer - Dorian's face, his eyes, are not made for such an expression; his frustration is as artless as a child's. He stands in one fluid movement, straightens his crumpled waistcoat and smooths away the hair from his over heated brow. In a moment he is himself again, exquisite, charming, an image of perfection that has crept into every painting Basil ever does and colours every thought and moment of his life.

 

*      *      *

 

They have tea in the parlour together, drinking out of pistachio-coloured cups with golden rims and wire-thin handles. Lord Henry's wife rattles in and out, trailing silk scarves and epithets, laughing in a shrill sputtering way which almost makes him regret the joke. Basil smiles, compliments the butterfly colours of her dress and grips his teacup till Henry worries the fine china will crumple in his hands. Eventually she leaves on one of those urgent, pointless errands she concocts to entertain herself, and Henry can finally rescue his cup from its fate and take Basil's hot hands into his own cool ones.

“It's about Dorian” he guesses, because with Basil it always is, one way or another. “What has he been doing to you? Is it that affair with Adrian Singleton? Don't worry about it, the boy knew what he was getting into.”

Basil jerks so hard the teacups rattle and slosh into their saucers.

“You think it's true, all of it?”, and he twitches his hands from Henry's grip as if it burned him. Henry just laughs and waves his newly-freed fingers with airy insouciance.

“True? Who can say? Certainly not all of it, he couldn't have had the time. And Adrian got himself sent down from Oxford on his own merits, his father may want to pile his parental failings at Dorian's door, but even Dorian can't lead someone into mischief from sixty miles away.”

Basil takes a long, slow breath, then another. The colour washes in and out of his cheeks.

“This morning I struck an old friend in the face because he called Dorian...he called him...” he rolls the word silently around in his mouth, tasting it, choking on it. It hangs in the air between them like the strange smoke from Henry's cigarette. “I've known Charlie for fifteen years, we used to sit on the lawn outside Christchurch and draw birds together but when he said that...”

His hands are clenched white around the cup again, every fingernail chewed to the point of bleeding. Henry has heard all the stories of course, heard them from his friends, from gossips, from Dorian himself. Most disconcertingly of all he sometimes hears them from the portrait, normally after the first rumours have already reached him, but not always.

Basil's isolationist tendencies have shielded him from the worst of it and Henry does not tell him the rest, how Dorian moves through London society like Dionysus through the ancient streets of Thebes, dancing women into ruin and kings to bloody scraps. Still, he does not believe in Dorian's wickedness, anymore that he believes in his own. Dorian drags his scandals behind him like a peacock's train and is no more touched by them than a comet is burned by its own fiery tail. But this is not something that Basil can understand.

 "I am not deaf, Harry, and I am not blind. I know what they say about him in the streets and I know that when Dorian walks into a room good men walk out of it. I have these terrible dreams."

Henry's stomach gives a sudden cold twist but Basil is not finished speaking and there is something terrible and ecstatic in his expression that Henry has never seen in a human face before, outside of a certain style of religious painting. A martyr turning their bleeding face to God.

"But then I see him, I see him and everything I love about him shines from his face like a lamp. I see his stainless soul in his unblemished skin, the gold of his character in his hair, every line and curve of him proclaims his innocence, every glance from his eyes reminds me why I love him. Oh his eyes, they are like hyacinths, like deep lakes, like the morning and evening sky. Only the best of men could have eyes like that, God would not have it any other way, he would not give a sinner such eyes...” He trails off, his hands pale and shaking, his cheeks flushed with hot rapture. One nervous, trembling hand creeps up to cover his heart, as if it pains him. The knuckles have black hairs on them.

Lord Henry gazes at him in mingled disgust and pleasure. It was like biting into an unripe fruit, green and hard, and finding oneself with a mouthful of thick syrup. He cannot imagine this romance has been consummated. Basil never quite talks of Dorian as if he is a person, one of those little scraps of soul bound to earth by the same responsive, needy flesh that binds every living creature. He will not worship Dorian as any man wants to be worshipped, nor touch him with a touch any man could want.

He can almost see the sorry encounter; Basil on his knees with his careful artist's hands clasping Dorian's own, pressing chaste kisses upon the soft white palms, back bent in the unhappy posture of a supplicant. Grateful and ungracious, wishing to please and knowing he has not; a nerveless trembling acolyte, pouring wine and olive oil and blood in turn upon the altar, hoping to bring a smile to the god's ivory face.

It is a tragedy really, that such wealth of feeling could not have resulted in anything more worthwhile than some fumbling, spotless encounter that could barely be described as a sin.

“If I'd know you had speeches like that in you, I might have gone after you myself” he says, eventually “I'd love someone to say such things about me. A woman's passion is as insipid as watered wine and turns sour as vinegar when thwarted, but you would have made me feel as if I had been drowned in Malmsey.”

“You're making it sordid Harry, you always do. One day I might start to think you mean it. But I won't hear a word said against Dorian, do you understand? I won't.”

“You speak as if I don't own eighteen photographs of him.” Henry takes a slow drag on his cigarette and half closes his eyes in pleasure as the hot smoke numbs his throat.

The portrait leans against the wall and watches their exchange in cold amusement. Basil's signature hangs in red letters in the air next to it, and as it straightens and starts to pace about the room it follows it like a dog. Henry thinks of Phidias, who had carved a statue of Zeus thirteen meters high, a wonder of the ancient world and had signed it, not with his name, but the name of his lover, carved into the bone of the god's smallest finger.

“Do you love Basil?” he asks, later, once the man in question has left and Henry is relaxing in the near solitude of his cream and oak library, slippered feet buried deep in a Turkey carpet.

It is an intellectual curiosity which prompts the question. The image before him is flat and painted, any depth the cunning illusion of a skilled artist. Where would such a creature store its affections? Where does a hallucination keep its heart?

 _'I hope you're not jealous'_  it says archly, and Henry is shocked into such a loud boisterous laugh that Victoria hears it and comes fluttering down the stairs to share the joke.

 

*      *      *

 

_'Look at me.'_

It is nearly dawn and the room is grey and cold, claggy with damp. It is, in Lord Henry's opinion, the least pleasant time to be awake, because it is so hard to imbue with luxury. Last night's fires have gone out and the morning's have not yet been lit, the sky has neither colour, nor mystery, it is too light for candles but too dark to fully appreciate the carefully chosen colour scheme of the apartment. He tries for sleep.

 _'Look at me,'_  it insists,  _'look at my face. It is the face of a man who will do something dreadful.'_

Henry looks and it is no longer a pleasure to do so. The figure leers back at him, tongue showing pink and coy in the gap left by missing teeth.

“Something dreadful?” he asks, giving in, “What is it to be? Gilded tortoises and disgusting financial extravagance? Or some sweeter, itching sin?”

The stories the figure relates on an almost nightly basis are better than any penny dreadful, an unusual mixture of French decadence and Holywell Street pulp.

_'At this very moment Dorian is clasped in the arms of a promising young scientist. The scientist is professing his love and Dorian is thinking how boring he is and how ugly he becomes when excited.'_

“Is he ugly?”

_'No, but Dorian will tell him that he is and he will never quite stop believing it. Before he never cared but now he has been shown what Beauty is and soon he will be told he does not deserve it. This is the last moment of happiness he will ever know and he is spending it with his lips buried in my hair.'_

It tosses its head affectedly, a relic of grace, and the straggling remnants shiver across its lined brow.

“How terrible” Henry yawns pointedly and closes his eyes. “Goodnight.”

_'You think me but a shadow on the wall and sit in chains with a fire ready to devour you at your back. You will not listen and you will not help.'_

“No,” said Lord Henry. “I will not. But don't let that stop you from coming, I have been entertained and that must be satisfaction enough.”

 

*      *      *

 

The ghost comes with red, wet hands and the awful smile of someone who has been proved right and is too pleased to care about the cost.

 _'Basil's dead'_  it crows, wild and triumphant, Agave bearing a dripping lion's head. _'Basil is a pile of ash scattered to the winds. Basil is four drops of blood on an old carpet.'_

Henry sits upright with difficulty, the dregs of a sweet torpor curdling in him like old milk. His tongue is thick behind his lips, he can taste the sourness of his breath and the acid fur upon his teeth.

“Basil is in Paris” He says slowly, or thinks he says.

 _'Basil is dead_ ' the figure repeats.  _'Tear your hair, curse my name, rent the empty air where I stand. He was your friend and I have killed him.'_

“You are the one burden of my extravagances” countered Lord Henry, “and I bear you willingly enough for their sake even if I can't bring you up in polite conversation.”

He always sleeps with a lamp burning these days. The figure brings with it the light of its own sunken sun and the gleam of it in a dark room is a horror which Henry can well afford to spare himself.

The housekeeper complains to him about smears of red paint upon the carpet and bedclothes. The paint comes out with turpentine but the sheets — a gorgeous poppy-coloured Flemish silk that he had not even begun to pay for — are spoiled. And Basil is still missing.

 

*      *      *

 

“It's very rude of you to keep turning up like this,” Henry says, irritably, “It's the only one of your crimes I couldn't possible forgive. And you are not nearly so pleasant a visitor as you used to be.”

Even in the daylight his room has started to stink of blown roses and turpentine. He has purchased a new bedroom set, made entirely from camphor wood and the pale ivory glow of it lightens the room and the soft odour of mint relieves his senses a little.

It crosses the room, and sits next to him on the bed, the signature shivers and trembles an inch from his fingers.

_'And you, of all people, hold me to account for that?'_

He has offended it. It raises dripping hands to its face and feels over the shape of it; the slack jowls at the neck, the loose, sullen lips and livid, cracked skin, thin as parchment. A clump of greyish hair sticks to the red paint that reaches almost to its elbows and falls to the floor in a shower of dull grey flakes. It watches them crumble into the carpet and the remnants of blue eyes are mad and grieving.

_'I am ruined by the crimes of another man. A man you laugh with, a man whose cup you have drunk from and whenever you have looked into his eyes or held him in your arms it was my eyes that looked back and my ageing, corrupted skin that felt so soft and warm under your greedy fingers.'_

Henry gives a convulsive little twitch of disgust at the thought and the creature laughs with a sound like tearing canvas.

_'This morning you kissed me and bade me come ride with you on the morrow and when the splendid figure comes cantering up the drive on his copper crested, ebony-maned horse it will be my hands that grip the reins and make it bend its sorry head in pain.'_

It is hard to think in the roiling perfume that fills the room. Henry drags himself into a seated position and reaches for a little bottle on the sideboard, thick black glass with a rubber dropper, and puts five drops of it into a crystal water glass. It tastes of roses and of rot.

“You could convince me that Dorian has sordid loves, or that he drinks deeper than the world thinks he should from what the world has to offer. But you will never make me believe that he is ugly, or that his crimes are without grace and taste. Dorian's soul does not look like you.”

Another ripping laugh, but the tingling euphoric apathy is starting up in his toes and fingertips and Henry can close his eyes contentedly against it, can almost forget it is there entirely.

_'Dorian's soul? Dorian's soul? Why, you said it yourself that to influence a man is to put your own soul into him.'_

A cruel smile bends its lips back, revealing yellow, crumbling teeth and swollen gums tight and hot with polluted blood. Its joy is a wretched thing.

 _'What have you done?'_  it says ' _What have you done?'_

 

*      *      *

 

It is still early when Henry returns home, the servants are awake to take his gloves and hat, to slip his coat off his aching shoulders. He is offered tea, brandy and champagne in turns and declines them all, requests a cloth soaked in ice water for his headache.

His spirit knocks about inside him, buried alive in its own exhausted body. It had been a dull party, with no one really worth being clever at and even more insufferably, several who thought they were capable of joining in.

The portrait currently hangs in the centre of his bedroom wall, an indulgent location. When he has guests he moves it to the entrance way so it is the first thing they see upon coming in. He had paid a fortune for it, or at least he would when his creditors pressed him hard enough. Basil's disappearance has given the gloss of notoriety to even the most indifferent of his works and Henry had watched lifeless daubs of cottages and English countrysides sold for shocking sums.

The painting stares somewhere over his shoulder, no matter where he stands in the room those wondrous eyes always seem to be fixed on something beyond him, with their eternal look of something newly woken. The long scrawl of Basil's signature still unfurls its bright red letters along its base like a flag. Henry will never believe that Dorian was responsible for his death. It is absurd, Basil died on a Parisian street, victim of some mundane catastrophe, an accident of so little import that the world took no notice, wheeling on its way and leaving him behind to unravel in whatever riverbed or ditch his fate had marked for him.

Driven by some strange impulse he reaches up a hand and touches it to the painting's own as if he would crack though the separating layer of varnish and catch it up, and kiss it. The paint is cold against his fingers and he leans his aching head against it.

“I miss you” he murmurs into the canvas but recent crippling bouts of nausea have forced him down to forty grains a day and the painting just smiles past him through gently parted lips, at a marvel that Henry cannot see.

**Author's Note:**

> "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music" - Henry Wotton
> 
> "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." - Basil Hallward


End file.
